Searching the Semantic Web

Searching the world wide web

At the moment Search engines are very inefficient at searching the web. This is because even the most intelligent of search spiders cannot "understand" any data written on a website instead they have to search pages for keywords. This generates allot of problems since the same keyword can have many different meanings for example if you were to search for the word bond the search engine wouldn't know whether you were searching for bank bonds, stock bonds, strong bonds or even James bond.

The Semantic search

On the semantic web however XML tags and definitions will allow for a much more accurate search. Since search spider agents will be able to access ontologies and other resources a much more accurate breed of search engine will emerge. There is even talk of Intelligent search engines where each user will have to input his/her own profile which will allow the search engine to predict what the user wants. For example a 40 year old business woman will search for very different things than a 17 year old boy. The search engines may also learn by building individual user profiles which will learn what the user usually looks for by remembering what hits he/she has used in the past. For example if the someone who searches for bond only ever clicks on the hits referring to James bond then the next time the user searches for bond the hits referring to James bond will be displayed first. 

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